> 
> Hardware problem?

Dunno...
The disk I got actually had what looked like some partitions on it, but I
couldn't tell what kind, nor did I save the strange warning or error
messages that I got when I tried to list them (bad andy!). 

I did manage to delete all 4, and then make one big one. However, I didn't
use the option to "make one big partition /dev/sdX", but rather made
/dev/sdd1:

Disk /dev/sdd: 606 cylinders, 64 heads, 32 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 1048576 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls   #blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdd1          0+    605     606-   620528   83  Linux
/dev/sdd2          0       -       0         0    0  Empty
/dev/sdd3          0       -       0         0    0  Empty
/dev/sdd4          0       -       0         0    0  Empty

Andy